Membership for open clusters with Gaia DR2

DOI

Open clusters are groups of stars that form at the same time, making them an ideal laboratory to test theories of star formation, stellar evolution, and dynamics in the Milky Way disk. However, the utility of an open cluster can be limited by the accuracy and completeness of its known members. Here, we employ a "top-down" technique, Extreme Deconvolution Gaussian Mixture Models (XDGMMs), to extract and evaluate known open clusters from Gaia DR2 by fitting the distribution of stellar parallax and proper motion along a line of sight. Extreme deconvolution techniques can recover the intrinsic distribution of astrometric quantities, accounting for the full covariance matrix of the errors; this allows open cluster members to be identified even when presented with relatively uncertain measurement data. To date, open cluster studies have only applied extreme deconvolution to specialized searches for individual systems. We use XDGMMs to characterize the open clusters reported by Ahumada & Lapasset (2007A&A...463..789A) and are able to recover 420 of the 426 open clusters therein (98.1%). Our membership list contains the overwhelming majority (>95%) of previously known cluster members. We also identify a new, significant, and relatively faint cluster member population and validate their membership status using Gaia eDR3. We report the fortuitous discovery of 11 new open cluster candidates within the lines of sight we analyzed. We present our technique, as well as its advantages and challenges, and publish our membership lists and updated cluster parameters.

Cone search capability for table J/ApJ/923/129/table1 (Cluster parameters for 420 open clusters confirmed in this work and 11 newly discovered open clusters)

Cone search capability for table J/ApJ/923/129/table2 (Individual membership measurements)

Identifier
DOI http://doi.org/10.26093/cds/vizier.19230129
Source https://dc.g-vo.org/rr/q/lp/custom/CDS.VizieR/J/ApJ/923/129
Related Identifier https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/ApJ/923/129
Related Identifier http://vizier.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/VizieR-2?-source=J/ApJ/923/129
Metadata Access http://dc.g-vo.org/rr/q/pmh/pubreg.xml?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_b2find&identifier=ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/ApJ/923/129
Provenance
Creator Jaehnig K.; Bird J.; Holley-Bockelmann K.
Publisher CDS
Publication Year 2023
Rights https://cds.unistra.fr/vizier-org/licences_vizier.html
OpenAccess true
Contact CDS support team <cds-question(at)unistra.fr>
Representation
Resource Type Dataset; AstroObjects
Discipline Astrophysics and Astronomy; Galactic and extragalactic Astronomy; Natural Sciences; Observational Astronomy; Physics; Stellar Astronomy